[Tisthammerw]

Originally Posted by Reach

I suppose there is argument from some silly individuals that you can show microevolution is true but can't show that macroevolution is true, but what they're missing is that macroevolution is a direct consequence of the existance of microevolution 8)

It's actually not as straightforward as that. Sure we can see moths mutate into different colors, a mutation producing an extra limb, or shuffle around fly parts. But even with limitless extrapolation, these just aren't the kind of changes we need. Duplicating, deleting, and shuffling around fly parts might produce some weird new fly, but such processes are fundamentally not sufficient for creating a new basic type. If we extrapolate the duplication of fly limbs without limits, we will merely get a many-limbed fly--not a fundamentally different kind of organism.

Scientists have pointed to a number of organs in extant species that have deteriorated and become vestigial, but have we found any extant species that are in the process of developing new organs? These are the kinds of changes that would validate large-scale evolution (because here we would really have something to extrapolate), but we have not observed such changes. One could say that changes like those are so slow they cannot be observed. Perhaps, but the point is that one cannot just extrapolate the observable changes we see to create new basic types.